Widely acknowledged as one of the most significant and talented 19th century French photographers, Charles Marville is best known for his series of photographs of "Old Paris," executed from about 1865 to 1870. Commissioned by the city under the aegis of urban planner Georges-Eugène Baron Haussmann, Marville recorded, in large format albumen prints, the narrow streets and crumbling buildings of the pre-modern city at the very moment they were threatened by demolition. The photographs were also created systematically, in advance of the city's plans for renovation, and with an eye toward recording maximum visual information that would prove useful to a variety of audiences: archivists, architects, and city planners. Rich in texture and crystalline detail, the photographs are captivating for their formal rigor and their historical poignancy—in many cases, these photographs serve as the only visual record of sites that have long since vanished.

The Old Paris series is not, however, the only work that Marville undertook in his thirty-year career as a photographer. This talk first considered how Marville's seventeen-year tenure as an illustrator before taking up photography shaped and directed his talent for landscape and especially architectural work, paving the way both visually and professionally for his municipal views. Secondly, the talk examined how Marville recorded the emergence of modern Paris by photographing dam building projects, churches undergoing renovation, and a host of modern conveniences, such as the elegant gas lamps that were installed throughout the city, Morris columns, Wallace fountains, and even the poetically-named vespasiennes (public urinals) that cemented Paris’s reputation in the 1860s as the most modern city in the world. Sharp-edged, beautifully detailed and brilliantly composed, Marville’s photographs of the new city—a phoenix arisen from the ashes of the Commune and Franco-Prussian war of 1871—construct the visual rhetoric of modernity as characterized by abstraction, clarity, and a formal rigor that elided but did not wholly obscure the city’s more troubled political and social histories. As the talk suggested, Marville’s photographs of Paris do not simply document change but in their very form, they explore and present the aesthetic and spatial paradigm of modernity as it was being consolidated in the 1860s and 1870s.

Dr. Mary Ellen Hayward, author of a book on Baltimore’s alley houses, and Jonathan Sager, an expert on D.C.’s alley houses, will compare and contrast this specialized housing form as it appeared in both cities. During the second half of the 19th century, when large numbers of foreign immigrants or rural African-Americans began pouring into U.S. cities, they had to be housed. Instead of building tenements, land developers in Baltimore and Washington opted for the solution of erecting smaller, single-family houses on narrower, mid-block streets.

In Baltimore, smaller houses began to be built on the “alley” streets that bisected most city blocks as early as the 1780s and this development pattern continued unabated until 1909, when the city council outlawed further building on streets less than thirty-feet wide. Over the course of the nineteenth century, alley houses in Baltimore were built in vernacular versions of Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, and Neo-classical styles, usually by the same builders who were erecting larger, main street houses at the same time.  In many cases these smaller, more affordable houses became the homes of the most recently arrived new immigrant group. Thousands of Baltimore’s alley houses survive and many located within a few blocks of the ever-expanding rehabilitated waterfront are now considered desirable homes.

In Washington, most alley houses were built in the decades immediately following the Civil War, in a modified Italianate style, and many were located on inner block courts with limited access to main streets. As in Baltimore, developers erected the small structures to meet the housing needs of the poorest element of the population—in Washington’s case, the large influx of freed slaves and later, poor black tenant farmers, seeking to relocate in the city in search of better jobs. Today, relatively few D.C. alley houses survive, but photographs document this once-important urban housing resource.

For nearly half a century, Mary Colter (1869-1958) designed buildings and interiors that charmed travelers to the American Southwest. Created for the Fred Harvey Co. and its partner, the Santa Fe Railway, Colter's hotels, tourist attractions, railroad stations, restaurants, shops, and furnishings -- located along Santa Fe's main line and at the Grand Canyon -- delighted the eye and engaged the mind. All of them were inspired by the region's rugged landscapes and its rich Native American and Hispanic cultures. Once obscure, Colter is now celebrated as a pioneer in the development of a truly American architecture.

Arnold Berke will trace the life and career of Mary Colter, who grew up in the Midwest, influenced by the American Arts and Crafts movement. The talk will showcase all of Colter's major works, placing them in the cultural and economic contexts of their time and revealing how they influenced later architecture. A writer and editor in historic preservation, architecture, and urban planning, Arnold Berke is the author of Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest. He was until recently executive editor of Preservation magazine.